Phil Gilbert's Cultural Rebellion #BPM

Phil’s writing is always provocative and this time is no different: he brings together the subjects of BPM and Egyptian revolution in a single blog post! This hits home for BP3 because one of our best business partners is based in Egypt and we’ve been keeping a worried eye on the news -and luckily finding that our friends are doing just fine so far. From Phil:

A lot of that is fact… some is supposition. There’s one more fact I find interesting: Egypt’s army is a conscript army. Which means its army, given its size (1/2 million Egyptians) will inherently reflect all the nation’s constituencies and values – these will be internalized to an extent not possible when the army is not “democratically” selected. [Note: I’m not implying anything against a volunteer army, it also has many merits, I’m simply saying that Egypt’s isn’t, and therefore the demographics of the army more directly reflect the demographics, and therefore the sympathies, of the entire population.]

What Phil is driving at, is that in BPM – it might make sense for us to make sure our BPM initiatives are a cross-section of the real company we’re dealing with – not just a set of elite volunteer commandos. Although, you know, elite volunteer commandos are nice too.

I recently visited a customer that has taken an interesting approach to BPM: they’ve sprinkled the seeds of BPM around the organization, training something like 50 people, and making sure to train both a do-er and a manager in the same group- so that the person who “gets things done” can get support of their management when they want to take a BPM spin on their work or spin up a BPM project. They’re also taking a look at what various elements of their BPM initiatives have done that looks like best practice – and what doesn’t. And then looking for the right blend of technical and business approaches that is most likely to yield best results in the general case.